/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.16012805]

2020 I am forgotten

[Anonymous No.16012813]

>>16012805
I'll still always remember how you owned Rowling and DFW

[Anonymous No.16012832]

>>16012805
>The school of resentment must not prevail
>My time is done...defending the canon is up to ...you...anon....

[Anonymous No.16012857]

[Anonymous No.16012863]

Who will take his place in defending the Western Canon from the School of Resentment?

[Anonymous No.16012877]

>>16012863
It is our job anon

[Anonymous No.16012889]

>>16012857
hahaha

[Anonymous No.16012912]

I miss him bros, currently reading Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

[Anonymous No.16012932]

reminder he has two new books cooming out in autumn, Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles: The Power of the Reader's Mind Over a Universe of Death and The Bright Book of Life: Novels to Read and Reread

[Anonymous No.16012962]

>>16012932
Nice, didn’t know about this.

[Anonymous No.16012984]

>>16012813
Whats the quote from him on DFW?

[Anonymous No.16013004]

>>16012984
>Asked about novelist David Foster Wallace, who took his own life in 2008, but who has a new book out, “The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel,” put together from manuscript chapters and files found in his computer, Bloom says, “You know, I don’t want to be offensive. But ‘Infinite Jest’ [regarded by many as Wallace’s masterpiece] is just awful. It seems ridiculous to have to say it. He can’t think, he can’t write. There’s no discernible talent.”
>It’s all a clear indication, Bloom notes, of the decline of literary standards. He was upset in 2003 when the National Book Award gave a special award to Stephen King. “But Stephen King is Cervantes compared with David Foster Wallace. We have no standards left. [Wallace] seems to have been a very sincere and troubled person, but that doesn’t mean I have to endure reading him. I even resented the use of the term from Shakespeare, when Hamlet calls the king’s jester Yorick, ‘a fellow of infinite jest.’

And if you didn't already know, Bloom is just upset DFW made fun of him in endnote 366.

[Anonymous No.16013013]

>Criticism in the universities, I'll have to admit, has entered a phase where I am totally out of sympathy with 95% of what goes on. It's Stalinism without Stalin.

[Anonymous No.16013067]

>>16012805
Do we know if he ever said anything about John Williams? Having a little look in his Western Canon he doesn't seem to be there, although I know the whole thing is just the first people that came into Bloom's head over a couple hours, but, even though I don't know if he'd be a fan of a book like Stoner, you would think that he'd have something to say about it at least.

[Anonymous No.16013091]

>>16012863
Nobody, let it die. The West is unsalvageable.

[Anonymous No.16013123]

>>16013067
John Williams wasn't even really remembered until like ten years ago. I'm sure Harold Bloom read him, but he wasn't considered a popular writer at all.

[Anonymous No.16013207]

>>16013123
Didn't he win like a pretty big award for Augustus though? And even if he wasn't really known until quite recently, you'd think Blook at least would have said something somewhere if he had read him.

[Anonymous No.16013253]

>>16013207
It was the National Book Award. And quite frankly a lot of books that win it aren’t exactly classics. Sure ‘Herzog’, ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’, and ‘J R’ have won it, but so have ‘Morte d’Urban’ and ‘The Hair of Harold Roux’. I’m certain Bloom has read most if not all award winners, but I doubt he found it necessary to comment on every single one.

[Anonymous No.16013270]

>>16013207
He won the National Book Award which he shared with John Barth that year. Either way, Bloom was mostly concerned with Shakespeare and the establishment of his Western Canon. I imagine he read Williams, but I can't imagine he has written about him unless someone asked him to in a letter.

[Anonymous No.16013579]

>>16013004

based

[Anonymous No.16013658]

>>16012805
>* 2020 I feel forgotten
stop using any from of 'to be'

[Anonymous No.16013672]

>He had read everything worth reading, or claimed to have. When he could still walk, he would allow bystanders on Yale quads to quote random lines of Milton to him, and he would pick up the line and keep reciting until he reached the other end of the quad.
>I tried to stump him—and only once succeeded. Last year, during one of Bloom’s periods of seriously failing health, I told him that as a teenager, I loved the novels of Anthony Burgess. Bloom could barely move, and he sat, as always, in a wheelchair in front of a table stacked with books and medicines. His voice shook with weakness, but he told me his Burgess stories and reminisced about drinking Fundador with him in New York. I said I had read all his novels but one: Earthly Powers, from 1980. (It begins with a perfectly Burgessian sentence: “It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.”)
>Then came Bloom’s startling reply: He had not read Earthly Powers either. Extracting that admission felt like a small victory, a confirmation of the human limitations of a man whose powers of reading sometimes seemed irritatingly superhuman.

Who was in the right here?

[Anonymous No.16013836]

does anyone has the "i have failed you" bloom pic?

[Anonymous No.16013840]

>>16013658
why?

[Anonymous No.16013856]

>>16012805
And for good reason. Just how fucking Angl*centric and unnecessarily bloated with literal whos of the 20th century is his "canon"? His bardolatry is also fucking hilarious.

[Anonymous No.16013858]

>>16013840
Bourland and other advocates also suggest that use of E-Prime leads to a less dogmatic style of language that reduces the possibility of misunderstanding or conflict.

Kellogg and Bourland describe misuse of the verb to be as creating a "deity mode of speech", allowing "even the most ignorant to transform their opinions magically into god-like pronouncements on the nature of things".

[Anonymous No.16013890]

>>16013856

the fact that "Little Women" is in his canon makes me want to write him off, but he is worth listening to because was as well-read as anyone

[Anonymous No.16013892]

>>16012805
Just a reminder that he's a documented sex pest who probably molested countless co-eds during his time on the faculty at Yale

[Anonymous No.16013896]

>>16013858
I always found it odd that English ahs only the word "to be" to mean a vast range of things that in other languages are expressed with other verbs (for example, the verb "いる" in Japanese meaning "to exist" is used very often in the Te form of a verb in the way we use "to be". We will say "I am walking" whereas they will say "as for me, walking exists", or the even more interesting way to express that you know something is literally "my understanding exists").
It's all wrapped up in the Japanese philosophy of 物の哀れ, which contrasts greatly with out Western Platonic idea of the eternal ideal. Being a bilingual man who speaks both languages, I find that I think about things differently in the two, not just using different words but like the actual thoughts are different. Basically Chomsky was wrong and the Sapire Whorf Hypothesis is true.

[Anonymous No.16013971]

>>16013892
based and sex-pilled

[Anonymous No.16014100]

If any of you are looking to get into English poetry, Bloom has an incredible anthology, though it's not modern.

[Anonymous No.16014231]

>>16013836
come on now, someone has it

[Anonymous No.16014247]

His sticky RIP thread only just reaching a 1000 and getting derailed by /pol/ bait was the end of /lit/ for me.

[Anonymous No.16014256]

>>16013004
Based

[Anonymous No.16014628]

>>16013004
Based

[Anonymous No.16014668]

>>16012805
professional critics are scum. People are remembered for their accomplishments, thus critics are forgotten.

[Anonymous No.16014684]

>>16012805
good

[Anonymous No.16015951]

>>16012805
Overrated hack. When he finally expired, everyone in the faculty lounge and I had a good snicker at his expense.

[Z No.16015998]

>>16013067
He probably did but John Williams was anti Ralph Waldo Emerson while bloom worships Emerson so that probably came into conflict

[Anonymous No.16016286]

he's not forgotten, I'm flipping through his book about Yeats while I read Yeats

[Anonymous No.16016584]

>>16013658
>2020
>doesn’t understand meme formats

[Anonymous No.16016663]

>>16016584
>3000 - 80 doesn't try to create new meme formats

[Anonymous No.16016711]

>>16013067
John Williams is Richard Yates-lite, I have no idea why everyone decided to suck his dick in the past decade.

[Anonymous No.16016974]

He's a pariah, just like all other criticism "writers." If you ever publish a piece (and I do mean piece) of criticism, it's pretty much the kiss of death as far as real writers are concerned. You're consigned to the kiddie table from then on, and will forever dwell in that ghetto. Critics simply aren't invited to the parties. What serious artiste would ever address an envelope to a name like Greenblatt or Wood or Kakutani? Well, I do have one story. I once attended a cocktail party in the French Riviera hosted by a indomitable poetess. Several of the big name novelists were in attendance, including many of my fellow Oxford alumni. The mood was merry until a certain hack (in)famous for writing Western canons decided to gatecrash the villa. He was no doubt emboldened by a recent prize he won for (wait until you hear this) speaking against Mormonism. Sorry, just let me catch my breath. The moment this lost soul stepped under the veranda the entire party went dead silent and everyone turned to look at him with a single united look of disgust. The poetess, ever the angel, swooped in an engaged the poor fraud in his level of conversation. The talentless nobody was already bleary eyed, of course. No doubt he'd needed courage to even approach the door, and so decided to "party rock" from a copy of Angel's in America in his tiny rundown rental car outside. She graciously asked him if he was working on a new Western canon, and he replied (and I'll remember these words until the day I die), "No, a gnostic aesthetic theorem." The entire villa erupted in laughter and the sad little nothing was so mortified he simply slunk away. Only then did we return to our shimmering conversations about the craft. Who do these people think they are, really?

[Anonymous No.16017013]

>>16016974
>He can’t think, he can’t write. There’s no discernible talent

[Anonymous No.16018133]

>>16013672
Me. For giving you a (you) you so desired.

[Anonymous No.16018150]

>>16015951
Things that didn't happen.

[Anonymous No.16019851]

Going to be sad when he finally passes

[Anonymous No.16019878]

>>16013004
>Bloom is just upset DFW made fun of him in endnote 366.
I'm not so sure. Bloom's opinion is correct. Could have held regardless.

[Anonymous No.16019902]

>>16012805
Why didn't he like the beats? None of them were in his canon.

[Anonymous No.16019926]

>>16019902
the beats were all inconsequential shit

[Anonymous No.16019947]

Is this the actor of Come and See? He makes the same face, no offense, the movie is good

[Anonymous No.16019964]

>>16019902

>I can locate no literary value in On the Road, but I must admit the same blindness (if it is that) afflicts me when trying to reread the verse of Allen Ginsberg, a good acquaintance whom I miss personally. Howl, rather like On the Road, strikes me as an Oedipal lament, weeping in the wilderness for a mother's consolation. What both works lack sorely is the delicately nuanced artistry of our father, Walt Whitman, whose greatest poems may looks easy, but actually are superbly difficult. On the Road and Howl look easy, and are easy, self-indulgent evasions of the American quest for identity.

what did he mean by this?

[Anonymous No.16020012]

>>16019947
Image for reference

[Anonymous No.16020024]

>>16020012

[Anonymous No.16021092]

>>16019851
Anon, I...

[Anonymous No.16022380]

>>16016974
excellent larp, my fellow oxford chum!

[Anonymous No.16024277]

>>16012805
No you aren’t.

[Anonymous No.16024283]

>>16016974
Kek.

[Anonymous No.16024350]

>>16019964
Did you expect him to name the Jew?

[Anonymous No.16024921]

>>16012863
The intellectual Dark Web is here, see Joe Rogan and Sam Harris.

[Anonymous No.16024925]

Why does he always make that stupid fucking face